BuzzFeed News trained a computer to find them by letting a machine-learning algorithm sift for planes with flight patterns that resembled those operated by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump’s budget eliminates ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminates the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cuts funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of 6,000 of their people. It eliminates all research on climate change. It halves the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. “All the risks are science-based,” said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. “You can’t gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the D.O.E., you gut the country.”

Take a kernel of truth, warp it and its context in a funhouse mirror, and set it against a heavy backdrop of conspiracy, while raising the stakes with a generous dose of fear. The strategy has made Jones — a stocky central Texan with a penchant for clamorous outbursts, fanciful digressions, and meandering stream-of-consciousness monologues — a celebrity.

Last year, before Facebook realized it could just leverage its network to squash Snap, Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his presentation laying out a long-term vision for all the areas in which Facebook wanted to innovate. This year couldn’t have been more different: there was no vision, just the wholesale adoption of Snap’s, plus a whole bunch of tech demos that never bothered to tell a story of why they actually mattered for Facebook’s users.

It's tempting to blame the media for this, but the media is a reflection of our collective psyche magnified by modern technology. We need to value novelty less and learn how to delay gratification. Take a lesson from wine tasting and meditation. Accept that news happens and let it breathe undisturbed for a period of time. After all, hindsight is 20/20.

The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to children with brown eyes.

To test the effects of political polarization on Facebook we asked ten US voters – five conservative and five liberal – to agree to take a scroll on the other side during the final month of the campaign.

The essence of algorithm design is not to eliminate all error, but to make results robust in the face of error. Where de Havillands tried in vain to engineer a plane where the materials were strong enough to resist all cracks and fatigue, Boeing realized that the right approach was to engineer a design that allowed cracks, but kept them from propagating so far that they led to catastrophic failure. That is also Facebook’s challenge.

“It is not the right look if you’re trying to say you’re a high-quality, upper-tier website — if you have something like this on it — and I think it’s time for us to be honest about that,” said Keith Hernandez, Slate’s president.

There is a real thing that we call attention – a wildly complex, beautifully adapted method of focusing the brain’s resources on a limited set of signals. Attention is important. Without it, we would be paralysed by the glut of information pouring into us. But there’s no point having it if you can’t control it.

It leads to everyone having half-conversations all day long, with people frequently rotating through one slow-drip discussion after another, never needing to officially check out because “hey! it’s asynchronous!”